1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of commerce and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for acquiring a transaction record from an electronic point of sale (POS) system.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the art of commerce, including ecommerce, receipts are important records of financial transactions. Many receipts are physically printed on paper by point-of-sale (POS) systems, vending machines, ticketing machines or other systems or machines that facilitate completion of financial transactions or goods exchanges. Keeping, organizing, and retrieving paper receipts can be time consuming and tedious. Physical receipts might be lost, temporarily misplaced, or destroyed before they are aggregated for tax filing or other financial auditing purposes.
Many receipts are in electronic format. Such electronic receipts are used in e-commerce, where a financial transaction or goods exchanges is accomplished through Internet or via telephone. An electronic receipt is essentially a file that contains data that is similar to a paper receipt. Electronic receipts are delivered to the receiving parties remotely, or from a remote location. Therefore, the receiver of the record must send contact information to the sender, most commonly an email address. However, sharing an email address or other personal contact information with the receipt sender exposes the receipt-receiving entity to privacy and security risks.
More recently, efforts have been made to utilize electronic receipts for physical retail. There have been software products developed to integrate with POS systems to output the receipt information to a file. The electronic record or receipt is uploaded to a central server, from whence it is sent from the server to a receiving device, or it might be sent directly to the receiving device. A problem with this approach is that the consumer has to provide identification and contact information to the POS or to a third party service provider. In the case of a third party service, the provided contact and identification data may be used solely at the third party service.
A problem is also evident in the art that integration must be accomplished between a POS and a third-party system before records may be distributed to specific third-party systems or devices. Systems of this type often store more information about the receipt sending entity than just the receipt information and integration to such systems may raise security and privacy concerns, which may have an effect of slowing or preventing broad adoption of such electronic record distribution systems.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a record distribution system for a POS computing system that provides direct receipt distribution locally or to a remote repository controlled by a user.